What a weak and easily threatened mind you have.

I’m entertained by his dedication.

Who the hell wants to put their cold beer in the hot sand anyway??

Thank you. I don’t know much about setting up EFI partitions but I do wonder if that’s what is allowing some to seemingly avoid trouble while others don’t. I’ll try this.

It’s an i7-4700MQ. Definitely still a decent CPU and with 12GB of ram more than adequate. Not sure I’ll get touchscreen support with Linux, but I usually forget it’s a touchscreen anyway.

Thanks for the VM tip. I used VirtualBox in the past but not heard anything good about it lately.

I’ll definitely have to try that. What VM software would you recommend? My experience with VMs is very limited and only on Windows, not Linux.

The CPU is an Intel 47xx… can’t recall exact model. It’s a decent machine with 12GB of memory so should handle a VM ok even.

That’s definitely my fear. Tychosmoose’s experience gives me hope but maybe that’s just setting me up for disappointment. I guess I at least wanna make sure I keep my system backed up before updating Windows and maybe disabling auto updates.

Thank you for the reply. I only know enough about dd to know I don’t know enough to be doing anything with it, but I might try it anyway. 😀 I can clone the old to new drive using Macrium Reflect but not sure if that might impact the Linux install that follows… I assume not.

Anyway, thank you again for sharing so many details.

Thanks. I forget about the online version of MS. That might be our fallback plan if we get desperate.

Being that this laptop is probably 15 years old, I’m doubt the USB slots are going to benefit much from those high speed drives. They are USB3 at least.

Software-suite wise, I suspect that won’t be a problem long-term but I know we’ll have to look closely at least a few of our more complex documents - such as resumes - to make sure they can be converted properly. My wife is a spreadsheet maniac too, though I expect most won’t take special handling. Being able to boot back to Windows in a pinch will be beneficial though.

Mint was my thought since I’m using it on a couple home servers. I do however feel like I need to have a Windows boot option just in case she’s not happy or we run into problems with app compatibility. And honestly, I’m not at all familiar with trying to run Windows apps on Linux. I’ve only used Linux in a server environment myself, never as a desktop. I’m also about to jump ship with my primary machine too, but that’s a different story and I don’t have to worry about her having trouble using it.

App-wise, I know my wife is going to want to use Microsoft Word and Excel, and we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax. I have a feeling running from a USB drive will be way too slow.

I’ve worked with a live environment USB drive a few times but found the drives to be too slow for substantial use. The laptop is an old Toshiba Satellite running Windows 10 with an old Intel 47xx and 12GB of memory. Works fine but obviously trying to leave Windows. App-wise, I know my wife is going to want to use Microsoft Word and Excel, and we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax. Disk-wise, I bought a new 1TB SSD to use for this and as it currently only has a 256GB drive, I’ll have plenty of room for partitions.

Interesting strategy having Windows partitions at the beginning and end of the drive. Was that intentional to maybe make Windows not notice Linux? What boot manager are you using? The fact that you’ve went so long without issue certainly makes it sound like a good way to avoid Windows messing things up, but maybe your boot manager does a better job than others too.

Got a source for that. The majority of studies suggest that melatonin supplementation does not suppress endogenous production even with long-term use.